juggled with the longer and less
familiar of them--arboreal, peripatetic, matutinal, and the like! He
had an entirely independent and original way of pronouncing very many
words, and of converting certain phrases, such as 'young fellow my
lad,' into a single word of many syllables. I never met any one who
could so clearly convey hyphens (or dispense with them) by intonation.

Having passed through a small gateway, I skirted the side of a
comfortable-looking house of the spreading, bungalow type, with wide
verandahs; and so, by way of a shaded path, arrived at the foot of the
big cedar, just as the rosy-faced gentleman reached the ground from
his stairway.

'Well-timed, young peripatater,' he said, with a chuckling smile. I
noticed as he reached the earth that he walked with a peculiar,
rolling motion of the body. He certainly was stout. There were no
angles about him anywhere, nothing but rotundity. Withal, and despite
the curious, rotary gait, there was a suggestion of quickness and of
well-balanced lightness about all his movements. His hands and feet I
thought quite remarkably small. There was a short section of the bole
of a large tree, with a flattened base, lying on the ground near the
stairway. The gentleman subsided upon this airily, as though it had
been made of eider-down, and, crossing his pyjamed legs, beamed upon
me, where I stood before him.

'Peripatacious by habit, what might your name be, youngfellermelad?'

I told him, and he repeated it after me, twice, with a distinct
licking of his lips, suggestive of the act of deliberate wine-tasting.

'Good. Yes. Ah! Nicholas Freydon, Nick to his friends, no doubt. Quite
a mellifluant name. Nicholas Freydon. Tssp! Very good. You'd hardly
think now that my name was George Perkins, would you? Don't seem
exactly right, does it?--not Perkins. But that's what it is; and it's
a significacious name, too, in Dursley, let me tell you. But that's
because of the meaning I've given to it. But for that, it's certainly
an unnatural sort of a name for me. Perkins is a name for a thin man,
with a pointed nose, no chin, a wisp of hair over his forehead, and an
apron. Starch, rice, tapioca: a farinatuous name, of course. But there
it is; it happens to be the name of Dursley's Omnigerentual and
Omniferacious Agent, you see; and that's me. Tssp! Wharejercomefrom,
Nickperry, or Peripatacious Nick?'

The idea of using precautions with or attempting to deceive this
rosily rotun